The Talkies: The Magnificent Seven
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman The Magnificent Seven M ost months, since I have been writing this column, I have had to scrounge around to find just one recommendation as Movie of the Month....
...And it is as exciting as drama as it is as cinema...
...First, then, to dispose of the movies that are merely worth watching...
...Mimic, the only one of the seven easily to be found at your local Multiplexes, has likable stars (Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam) and skilled direction by Guillermo Del Toro (Cronos), and it is one of the very few films I have seen this year that really knows how to build suspense...
...The American Spectator ?October 19 97 69...
...Finally, allow me to recommend Shall We Dance...
...Perhaps the film's most impressive quality is the way that it resists the slopEvery one of them a Movie of the Month...
...Here is a story of mid-life crisis which does full justice to the harsh comedy of that ridiculous situation, yet one in which the sexual element is kept—as it is in the dance itself?carefully in the background...
...He recites that old chestnut, the "Desiderata" ("Go quietly amid the something something...
...Aunts...
...Yet that merely self-indulgent emotion is stiffened by our sense of the way in which their coming together has paradoxically enabled Sugiyama to give up dancing and Mai to go on with it...
...As they travel in opposite directions, their lives intersect for a moment in the spotlight at the center of a darkened ballroom, and their dance together becomes an affirmation not of some hypothetical lost love but of the people they are both going on to become...
...Yet if some of the voyeuristic impulse still hangs over the story, it is told quite without prurience or even any suggestion that anything grossly sexual actually took place...
...But Leigh seems to me to have become more and more directionless since Naked, and now scarcely knows what to do with all the splendid materials he has gathered...
...This has been such a month...
...As we watch his fate unfold, deserved though it may be, we are filled with pity and terror...
...As good as M in its own, more contemporary way is Love Serenade by the Australian director, Shirley Barrett...
...For Sugiyama, however, it is a metaphor for all that is missing from his life...
...I am stunned by the unexpected riches...
...The most remarkable thing about M is how revolutionary it still looks, even after sixty-six years...
...No, I just want to be able to locate something worth watching—perhaps only for the beauty of the photography, or the wit of the dialogue, or the charm of the characters, or the cleverness of the plotting...
...B ut enough of the merely watch-able...
...That I take to be an abstract and ironic appreciation of the human geometry, but one to which, nevertheless, we are invited to bring our own emotions...
...G.I...
...So, much as I might enjoy the usual fulminations at the likes of In the Company of Men and G.I...
...And Guantanamera in the final analysis is rather predictably "life-affirming...
...The fine neutrality with which he cuts back and forth between the councils of the police and those of the criminal underworld, or between the pursuit of the murderer and the murderer's pursuit of his victim, for all that it could at the time have elicited elaborate Freudian or Marxist interpretations, in retrospect merely looks like the best sort—now an almost unobtainable sort—of pure artistic modernism...
...And all in the endless search not even for something really good...
...It seems hardly surprising that Vicki Ann's44 This month those who are interested in junk-cinema are invited to visit our web site...
...Again as in the dance, they trade places...
...Jane JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement this month those who are interested in junk-cinema are invited to visit the web site —this column is to be devoted to nothing but the good stuff...
...Uncles...
...It is this stripping away of the social fabric which makes the biggest impression on us...
...Sugiyama, a rumpled and tired-looking, middle-aged corporation man who notices the face of the lovely Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari) looking mournfully out the window of a dance studio every day on his evening commute...
...And the kangaroo court in which Peter Lorre pleads for his life to the assembled thieves and prostitutes of Dusseldorf remains one of the most powerful scenes in all cinema...
...The sight of her becomes so powerful to him that he is drawn off his commuter train, in spite of a loving wife and daughter in the suburbs, and thence out of his boredom and discontent into the world of the dance ?which, in the Japanese culture of emotional reticence (we are told), is still faintly disreputable...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site?http://www.spectator.org...
...It has, indeed, the charm and delicacy of the best of French cinema yet at the same time an intellectual toughness that is wholly admirable...
...Mrs...
...I find out-of-the-way art movies playing in cinemas that double as porno houses during the day...
...On to the really good...
...Since last I wrote, I have seen four films that are worth watching and, mirabile dictu, three more that are really good...
...E-mail him at 72o56.3226@compuserve.com...
...Through it all, Ken Sherry, an aging product of the 1960's, takes on the desperation that is the local industry with a comic but at the same time rather horrifying mellowness...
...Naturally, only one of the seven is in any part a Hollywood product, and that has a Mexican director and a British co-star...
...Those of you masochistic enough to spend much time at the movies these days may agree with me that turning up even twelve movies a year with one or more of those qualities is no easy task...
...tale of how the most powerful woman in the world needed a strong man to lean on, and of that man's devotion to her...
...Instead, it is merely a touching and very un-P.C...
...We see their hair being swept up but not them...
...It is a desperate town at the end of the world, set in a landscape that is practically Martian...
...Really good happens maybe once or twice a year...
...There are apparently other people in town, but somehow the streets are always deserted, as in a "Twilight Zone" episode...
...Where is the engineer at the radio station...
...I squint to read the subtitles on films from Iran or China or Yugoslavia...
...Not only are they not here...
...The even-handedness with which our sympathies are led, first to the children who are the murderer's victims, then to the murderer himself, still has the power to shock...
...Thus it is that the emotional power of Shall We Dance...
...How often, after all, does one get such a chance...
...Sometimes I have to travel for miles...
...68 October 19 9 7 • The American Spectator py tendency to editorialize, so common among lesser directors than Lang, both then and now...
...She is angry at her sister for allowing Ken Sherry to think she is desperate, but she is desperate...
...It tells the story of Ken Sherry (George Shevtsov), a disc-jockey from Brisbane who arrives to take up a job in the little town of Sunray on the Murray River...
...The first of the three is something of a cheat, because it is a re-release of Fritz Lang's classic of 1931, M. Still, I think that such re-releases, especially in refurbished prints like this one, should be encouraged by every means possible...
...But just as it does when, every now and then, somebody's number comes up on the roulette wheel seven times in a row, the law of averages tells us that sooner or later we must hit a jackpot month...
...The clients in the beauty salon...
...The latest from Mike Leigh, Career Girls, and the last from the late Tomas Guitierrez Alea (who co-directed with Juan Carlos Tabio), Guantanamera, are both fun to watch...
...There is not the social framework for such a thing...
...Though this purports to be a romantic comedy-satire, I found it every bit as scary as Mimic—and without any of the dubious biology which makes that film a little less than convincing...
...Its main virtue is that it almost never allows you to think about its blemishes...
...Where are Dimity and Vicki Ann's parents...
...The former's sharp eye for social nuance and the Dickensian grotesque and the latter's sheer vitality and exuberance are enough to make you feel that you haven't wasted your time with them...
...a Japanese film by Masayuki Suo which is not spooky but simply charming...
...Friends...
...It still smells of the sixties and comes across as almost a mirror image of the worn-out Castroite idealism that it otherwise so mercilessly ridicules...
...The loneliness of this man playing records about love and, as Albert says, "the act of procreation" for those who never see him is the most remarkable thing about him too, yet he is like some kind of insect, caught in a Venus fly-trap, or a fish caught in a net (to use the imagery of the film itself) without knowing it...
...Its only flaws are a couple of fudges in the plot, as characters we thought were dead come back, as it were, to life, and a central premise that, if you think about it, is really ludicrous...
...But the benefits of what they learn from each other are destined in each case for somebody else...
...Brown, directed by John Madden, is the sort of "Masterpiece Theatre" style costume drama that normally I detest...
...He learns from Mai the necessary dance skills to take part in a competition, and she learns from him the necessary life skills to return to the professional competitions from which she has retired disheartened...
...nobody misses them either...
...They give us something to watch besides those ill-assorted Hollywood staples, explosions and feminist propaganda...
...17 love-life hitherto has been confined to a brief relationship with a boy she is said to have lost to a chainsaw accident...
...Cousins...
...But it takes fine acting by Judi Dench as the Queen, Billy Connolly as John Brown, and Anthony Sher as Disraeli to bring it off...
...Apart from Vicki Ann's fellow hairdresser, Debbie, and Dimity's boss, the Chinese nudist Albert (John Alansu), these are the only people we are allowed to know...
...from memory on the air and talks airily, hippie fashion, about love needing to be free...
...r* James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...How typical of those who ransack history's cupboards for commercial propositions to come up with an alleged affair of the heart between the widowed Queen Victoria and her Scottish groom...
...Koji Yakusyo stars as Mr...
...is summed up in what might seem the rather contrived and obvious scene of the last dance and the romantic poignancy of its associations with what might have been...
...In such a context, Vicki Ann's desire to get married to the decidedly louche Ken Sherry is subversive, almost unimaginable...
...their strengths are complementary and mutually reinforcing...
...This is an almost unbearably lovely film, and its only drawback is that it makes the prospect of a return, like mine next month, to the usual Hollywood dreck even more gloomy than it would otherwise be...
...He moves next door to two young sisters, a beautician and hairdresser called Vicki Ann (Rebecca Frith) and Dimity (Miranda Otto), who is a waitress in the local Chinese restaurant...
...Jane ingeniously manages to give us both...
...Where are the other customers in the restaurant...
Vol. 30 • October 1997 • No. 10
